NVIDIA GeForce 9300 and 9400 Motherboard GPUs

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Introduction and Specifications

With all of the recent hoopla surrounding Intel and NVIDIA as of late, today's announcement may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you. To say that there has been some tension between Intel and NVIDIA lately would certainly be putting it mildly. But the fact of the matter is, for now at least, the two companies share a somewhat symbiotic relationship. The products we'll be showing you here are proof of this fact.

What we have on tap for you today is a new NVIDIA chipset with an mGPU (or IGP) designed for the Intel Socket 775 platform, the GeForce 9300. We should note, however, that NVIDIA is also announcing the GeForce 9400 today as well, the same chipset that powers Apple's new MacBook line of products, but the two are nearly identical save for a few minor spec variations. Whether you're a small form-factor type, Home Theater PC buff or one of the newly enamored by Apple's new line of sleek notebooks, read on to find out about these enabling technologies that NVIDIA has launched today in platform chipsets with integrated graphics engines.

GeForce 9300 Block Diagram

The high-level block diagram above does a good job of clearly illustrating the GeForce 9300's (and 9400's) main features. As you can see, the GeForce 9300 supports virtually all flavors of Core 2, Pentium, and Celeron processors with front side bus speeds up to 1333MHz. The chipset is comprised of a single chip and the mGPU features 16 shader cores, with support for DX10 and many of NVIDIA's proprietary technologies, like CUDA, Hybrid SLI, PhysX and PureVideo HD. The GeForce 9300 mGPU has output support for virtually all of the major port types (DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI, etc.) with support for HD audio as well.

The chipset can support DDR2 or DDR3 memory technologies, although the two motherboards we'll be showing you in this article required DDR2. It also sports 12 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, six SATA 3.0Gb/s ports (with RAID), 20 PCI express 2.0 lanes, and support for 5 PCI slots.

CPU

Core 2 Family Pentium D Pentium 4 Celeron D Celeron

Core 2 Family Pentium D Pentium 4 Celeron D Celeron

FSB

1333 Mhz

1333 Mhz

Memory Interface

Dual-channel DDR2-800 / DDR3-1333

Dual-channel DDR2-800 / DDR3-1333

DirectX 10 Support

Yes

Yes

Graphics Cores

16

16

Core/Shader Clocks

580/1400 MHz

450/1200 MHz

Texture Fill Rate

3.6 Billion/second

3.6 Billion/second

Max. Anti-Aliasing (AA) Sample Rate

16×

16×

RAMDACs

400 MHz

400 MHz

Max. HDR Precision

128-bit

128-bit

Max. Analog Resolution

2048 × 1536

2048 × 1536

Max Digital Resolution

2560 × 1600

2560 × 1600

GeForce Boost Technology

Yes

Yes

HybridPower Technology

Only available in select designs

Only available in select designs

NVIDIA PureVideo HD

Yes With full HD decode (1080i/p)

Yes With full HD decode (1080i/p)

Display options

RGB, dual-link DVI, HDMI, DP

RGB, dual-link DVI, HDMI, DP

PCI-Express 2.0

20 lanes 1 × 16 4 × 1

20 lanes 1 × 16 4 × 1

SATA drives

6

6

SATA speed

3 Gbps

3 Gbps

RAID

0, 1, 0+1, 5

0, 1, 0+1, 5

NVIDIA MediaShield Storage technology

Yes

Yes

Networking

10/100/1000

10/100/1000

USB ports

12 / 2C

12 / 2C

PCI Slots

5

5

Audio

HDA (Azalia)

HDA (Azalia)

HD Audio Support

7.1 LPCM

7.1 LPCM

In terms of their specifications, the new GeForce 9300 and GeForce 9400 are nearly identical. As you can see in the spec list above, the only differences between the two are that the GeForce 9400 has a higher clocked GPU and shader cores. These attribute would obviously give the GeForce 9400 an edge in the 3D performance department, but as you'll see a little later, even the GeForce 9300 is far more powerful than any of Intel's current IGPs.